AMY GOODMAN: Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
I’m Amy Goodman.
"Let them kill us all, if that is the death sentence for reporting this hell.
No to silence."
Those are the words of award-winning Mexican reporter Javier Valdez after one of his colleagues,
Miroslava Breach, was assassinated in March.
Well, on Monday, Valdez was also assassinated, dragged out of his car, shot 12 times, less
than a block from the office of his newspaper, the one he co-founded in the Mexican state
of Sinaloa.
As news coverage here in the United States is hyperfocused on President Trump, we’ll
look at a major scandal just across the border that’s not being covered in the U.S. media:
the widespread violence against journalists in Mexico and the impunity for their killers.
The killing of Valdez, who wrote for the prominent newspaper La Jornada, has sparked widespread
outrage across Mexico.
On Tuesday, hundreds of people gathered for Valdez’s funeral in Culiacán, Sinaloa.
Hundreds more protested outside the Interior Ministry in Mexico City.
Multiple Mexican digital media outlets also went on a 24-hour strike, refusing to publish
anything but a black banner with the names of the journalists assassinated in Mexico
so far this year: Cecilio Pineda, Maximino Rodríguez, Ricardo Monlui, Filiberto Álvarez,
Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez.
In 2011, Javier Valdez came to New York to receive the International Press Freedom Award
from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
This is a part of what he said that evening.
JAVIER VALDEZ: [translated] I have nourished my withered soul with expressions in the streets,
embraces and handshakes, and words in which I have taken shelter.
This award is the finely aged and nutritious sum of all those embraces.
When Carlos Lauría informed me, I thought it was a cruel dream, and now I don’t want
to be woken up.
I have been a journalist these past 21 years, and never before have I suffered or enjoyed
it this intensely, nor with so many dangers.
In Culiacán, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, it is dangerous to be alive.
And to do journalism is to tread an invisible line drawn by the bad guys, who are in drug
trafficking and in the government, in a field strewn with explosives.
This is what most of the country is living through.
One must protect oneself from everything and everyone.
And there do not seem to be options or salvation, and often there is no one to turn to.
Thus it is important to count on family and friends, journalists and media outlets, like
the newspaper La Jornada, for which I am a correspondent, and the weekly Ríodoce, of
which I am a founder.
In my books Miss Narco and The Kids of the Drug Trade, I have told of the tragedy Mexico
is living, a tragedy that should shame us.
The youth will remember this as a time of war.
Their DNA is tattooed with bullets and guns and blood, and this is a form of killing tomorrow.
We are murderers of our own future.
This is a war, yes, but one for control by the narcos.
But we, the citizens, are providing the deaths, and the Mexican and U.S. governments, the
guns.
And they, the eminent, invisible and hidden ones, within and outside of the governments,
they take the profits.
I dedicate this award to the brave journalists, and to the children and youths who are living
a slow death.
I have preferred to give a face and a name to the victims, to create a portrait of this
sad and desolate panorama, these leaps and bounds and short cuts towards the apocalypse,
instead of counting deaths and reducing them to numbers.
This award is like a lighthouse on the other side of the storm, a safe harbor beyond the
tempest.
At Ríodoce, we have experienced a macabre solitude, because nothing that we publish
has reverberations or follow-up.
And that desolation makes us more vulnerable.
Despite all of this, with all of you, and with this award, I can say that I have somewhere
to take shelter and to feel less alone.
Muchas gracias.